Engineering, Leadership, and Life

I write about software engineering, leadership, and the judgment built through messy systems, team decisions, mistakes, and curiosity beyond work.

6 min read

The Work Runs on Different Maps

A project can be obviously important, technically sound, budgeted, and still go nowhere. I don’t mean slowness. I mean the weird kind of stalled where everyone involved can poin...

6 min read

Breaking Up With WordPress After Two Decades

Around Black Friday last November, I moved my website from SiteGround to Bluehost. This was not some ambitious infrastructure decision. SiteGround wanted roughly five times more...

4 min read

Your Work Introduces You

Years ago, when I first joined Tripadvisor, we had a tool that moved data to Amazon Redshift. One of the engineers went on holiday, the tool had a few bugs, and people were bloc...

9 min read

Trial By Fire

Teams spend months hiring a strong candidate. Sourcing, interviews, debriefs, approvals, compensation, notice period. Everyone treats the hire like a serious investment. Then th...

10 min read

The Dude

It was during my college years that I saw the Big Lebowski for the first time. Within days, my friends and I were calling each other “dude”. Living in Turkey, despite Englishspe...